Quotes from the home page

posted 8 September 2018“Someone needs to explain to me why wanting clean drinking water makes you an activist, and why proposing to destroy water with chemical warfare doesn’t make a corporation a terrorist” —Winona LaDuke

posted 2 September 2018‘The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children.’
—Dietrich Bonhoeffer, German theologian

posted 24 March 2018
“the powerful do what they wish and the weak suffer what they must”—Athenian historian & military leader Thucydides, in History of the Peloponnesian War

posted 11 January 2018“The really inconvenient truth is that global warming is not about carbon—it’s about capitalism… and the war that system is waging on Earth.”

—Naomi Klein, in This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate
posted 19 October 2017Back to the future?
“We should be using nature’s inexhaustible sources of energy—sun, wind, and tide….”
—Thomas Edison, in a 1931 conversation with Henry Ford & Harvey Firestone

posted 3 September 2017
“A good question is never answered. It is not a bolt to be tightened into place, but a seed to be planted and to bear more seed toward the hope of greening the landscape of idea.
—poet John Ciardi (1916–1986)

posted 10 June 2017
“Serving healthy and sustainably grown food is as essential to the health of our community as the medical care we provide.”—Siobhan McNally, MD; Pediatrician, Berkshire Medical Center

posted 10 June 2017
“Unsustainable actions have affected the ecological processes and functions that keep our planet stable… violating the human rights of younger and future generations by taking away their opportunity to live in a healthy, stable living environment.”—Leah Boecker, former intern, in her 2013 Essay ‘Sustainability and the Rights of Future Generations‘

posted 14 January 2017“We must begin to understand that we are all in this together. In our globalized world, everything we do affects not only the people around us, but also the people on the other side of the world. Almost every decision we make has an environmental impact, and therefore, an impact on human rights.”— Jacy Good, former campus sustainability intern and 2008 Muhlenberg College graduate, in ‘Whatever We Do to the Web of Life We Do to Ourselves‘.

posted 14 December 2016

“The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.”—Neil deGrasse Tyson, Physicist, Director of the Hayden Planetarium

posted 20 October 2016:
“We face a stark choice: we can destroy the conditions for human life on the planet by clinging to ‘free-market’ fundamentalism, or we can secure our future by bringing commerce within the laws of ecological sustainability and social justice.’—Vandana Shiva, author and scientist

posted 26 September 2016:
“Too many people today accept the notion that their fate is solely a matter of individual responsibility, irrespective of wider structural forces…. This troubling trend is not only profoundly anti-democratic, but also works to eliminate structural, systemic, and social concerns from public discourse.”—Henry A. Giroux, in his new book, America at War with Itself.

posted 9 September 2016:
“The U.S. government is wiping out our most important cultural and spiritual areas… and as it erases our footprint from the world, it erases us as a people.”—LaDonna Brave Bull Allard

posted 8/24/16:
“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”—George Orwell, in his visionary novel 1984

posted 8/9/16:
“As the Third Circuit Court of Appeals has recently held [2008], the existence of a permit to use public property does not allow the permit holder (or the police) to restrict free speech activities that do not obstruct the permitted activity.”—American Civil Liberties Union of PA, in a letter to the City of Bethlehem, July 2010

posted 7/31/2016:
“The people have a right to clean air, pure water, and to the preservation of the natural, scenic, historic, and esthetic values of the environment. Pennsylvania’s public natural resources are the common property of all the people, including generations yet to come. As trustee of these resources, the Commonwealth shall conserve and maintain them for the benefit of all the people.”—Article I, §27 – Constitution of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania

posted 7/26/2016:
“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”– Preamble to the Constitution of the United States of America, 1789

posted 7 July 2016:
“Climate change is the single greatest threat facing our planet. The debate is over, and the scientific jury is in: global climate change is real, it is caused mainly by emissions released from burning fossil fuels, and it poses a catastrophic threat….”—Senator Bernie Sanders, 2016

posted June 17, 2016
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”—Preamble to the Declaration of Independence, issued by the Continental Congress in creating the
United States of America, July 4, 1776

posted June 2
“It does not take a majority to prevail… but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men.”—Samuel Adams

posted May 16:“The building of movements and sustained civil disobedience is far more important than voting. Voting without powerful and organized movements is futile. Voting without profound electoral reform, including banishing corporate money from politics, is useless.”—Chris Hedges, 16 April 2016

posted May 9, 2016:
“Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children, the angering of the orderlies in the front parlor of the charnel house. We could not, so help us God, do otherwise.”—Fr. Daniel Berrigan (1921–2016), at the Catonsville 9 Trial in 1968

posted 4/3/16:
“Growing that grain will require the felling of forests, the plowing of prairies, the draining of wetlands, and the destruction of topsoil. In most places on earth, it will never be sustainable, and where it just possible might be, it will require rotation with animals on pasture. So you’re an environmentalist; why are you still eating annual monocrops?”– Lierre Keith, The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability, 2009: 100-101.

posted 2/6/16:“Where was I going to draw the line [between beings it was okay and not okay to kill]? Mammals, fish, insects, plants, plankton, bacteria? If ‘what’ became ‘who’, then what would be left to eat? I have my answer, finally. I’m not going to draw a line. I’m going to draw a circle.”– Lierre Keith, The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability, 2009: 92-93.

posted 1/23/16:“One tablespoon of soil contains more than one million living organisms. Their life processes—eating, excreting, tunneling, communicating, exchanging—were what made the rest of the planet livable.”– Lierre Keith, The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability, 2009: 18-19.

posted 1/13/16:“I had built my entire identity on death being an ethical taboo, a moral horror, one that provoked a visceral shudder through body and soul. But ‘death-free’ is not an option that the processes of life offers us.”– Lierre Keith, The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability, 2009: 77

posted 1/6/16:“The truth is that agriculture requires the wholesale destruction of entire ecosystems. The truth is also that life isn’t possible without death, that no matter what you eat, someone has to die to feed you.”– Lierre Keith, The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability, 2009: 3

posted 12/16/15:“The people of New Hampshire, rather than continuing to waste time, energy, and financial resources in regulatory red herrings, instead are enacting local rights-based ordinances and working to drive those rights into the state constitution.”— New Hampshire Community Rights Network Press Release, 12/11/15

posted Nov 2015:
“Populists have always been out to challenge the orthodoxy of the corporate order and to empower workaday Americans so they can control their own economic and political destinies… [unlike] classic liberalism, which seeks to live in harmony with concentrated corporate power by trying to regulate its excesses.”—Jim Hightower, in Hightower Lowdown, May 2009, Vol 11, No 5

Important Notice - Information on this website does not necessarily represent the position of the Alliance or the views of its members. As part of our effort to promote open discussion and dialogue, we frequently post material that is of current concern, especially on subjects that are not covered in the mainstream media or if that coverage is incomplete or one-sided.